Welcome to Love and Abuse, the show about helping you identify poisonous communication and toxic behavior.

You deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.

That's why it's important that you learn to pinpoint manipulative and controlling behavior so that you keep your power and your sanity.

I'm your host, Paul Koliani.

Music power and your sanity. I'm your host, Paul Koliani. Thanks for tuning into another episode of love and abuse. I'm glad you're here.

And I just want to let you know, just like every other episode,

all the information that you hear on the show is for educational purposes only. Always

consult a professional before making any changes that could affect your health and well-being.

And in today's episode of love and abuse, so I'm going to read an email. When you hear

what this person has gone through, you're pretty much going

to hear almost every single aspect of emotional abuse. And if you're not using the mean

workbook, if you haven't gotten it, this email is going to outline a whole lot of what an emotionally abusive relationship is made up of.

And so listen to her words. I'm going to call her Mary. And I love how Mary worded things here

because in emotionally abusive relationships, it's often hard for the victim of the emotional

abuse to convey to others that they are being emotionally abused.

It's very hard because every time you communicate that so-and-so did this, the person you're

telling is typically going to say, well, that doesn't sound so bad.

And this is part of all the crazy making that can go on. You just want to pull your hair out.

So-and-so did this to me. Oh, that doesn't sound so bad. Yeah, in fact, I might even do that.

You might even hear that, too. The problem with that, obviously,

you can't describe emotional abuse to people unless either, A, they've been through it, or B,

understand that it takes the slow picking away at your self-worth and self-esteem and also driving you to appear irrational and

...